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A longstanding and well-beloved member of this Forum (anonymous, so if you know the man, please do not reveal his name) tomorrow will be ordained as a priest of Jesus Christ. He has requested this thread so that prayers may be offered. Please join me in thanksgiving and petition that his vocation will be fruitful and joyous: Heavenly Father, grant these and other blessings unto thy servant, for thy glory and the salvation of souls. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Ad multos annos, gloriosque annos, vivas, vivas, vivas!

Christians in the Holy Land and in the UK will be without altar wine from Bethlehem this Christmas because Israeli soldiers are refusing to allow lorries carrying the wine to enter Israel. The wine is made by a Roman Catholic religious order, the Salesians of Don Bosco, at the Cremisan winery in Beit Jala, a suburb of Bethlehem in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank. The Salesians have been producing wines for the past 125 years as a means of supporting their pastoral and educational work among the poor of Bethlehem. But for the last five weeks Israeli soldiers...

Tel Aviv (AsiaNews) - The Delegation of the State of Israel, expected at the Vatican on Thursday 29 March, has decided not to come, and has communicated this only a very few days before the scheduled appointment. The news was soon widely known among media people in Rome, who cover the Vatican, since several key journalists had been invited to meet the Head of the Israeli Delegation on Thursday evening, following the negotiations in the Vatican, and have now had to be told by the Israeli Authorities that Israel had decided not to send the Delegation. In the absence so...

Not eating meat on Fridays used to be synonymous with being Catholic. Restoring abstinence would not only revive tradition but signal solidarity with the poor.THE RENEWAL inaugurated by the Second Vatican Council sprang in large part from the liberating discovery of the depth and variety of Catholic tradition. Yet paradoxically the post-conciliar reforms were sometimes implemented in a spirit of philistine dismissal of “tradition” as nothing more than the dead hand of the past. In shedding a past perceived as sterile and oppressive, much that was profound and life-giving was also lost. One of the saddest casualties of that process...

I sit on the board of Dayspring Homes ("Through the tender Mercy of our God, With which the Dayspring from on high has visited us; To give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, To guide our feet into the way of peace." Lk. 1:78), a not-for-profit corporation that runs residential homes for mentally challenged adults. The founder of this organization is a devout, passionate, indefatigable nun. Though Dayspring accepts residents from all religious backgrounds, the atmosphere in the homes is distinctly Catholic. Recently, I attended a Mass for the residents, employees and board members...

Loyola president resigns amid sexual misconduct allegations Complaint was lodged in mid-80's while Knoth was in Indianapolis 03:08 PM CDT on Tuesday, October 7, 2003 WWLTV.com Loyola University of New Orleans accepted the resignation of its president, the Rev. Bernard P. Knoth Tuesday amid allegations of sexual misconduct that occurred while he was assigned in Indianapolis during the mid 1980's. In a written statement, Knoth denied any inappropriate conduct stemming from a complaint about an incident in 1986. WWL-TV Reverend Bernard P. Knoth Knoth said that his decision to resign came after the provincial superior of the Chicago Province...

WASHINGTON, July 7 — The White House acknowledged for the first time today that President Bush was relying on incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information from American intelligence agencies when he declared, in his State of the Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from Africa. The White House statement appeared to undercut one of the key pieces of evidence that President Bush and his aides had cited to back their claims made prior to launching an attack against Iraq in March that Mr. Hussein was "reconstituting" his nuclear weapons program. Those claims added urgency to the White...

<p>NEW YORK--The timing couldn't have been better. The U.S. is soon likely to go to war in Iraq in no small part because of the arguments of thinkers who have graced the pages of Commentary magazine over the years, opposing appeasement and urging a strong U.S. military presence in the world--to face down tyrants and spread democracy. And here was the City University of New York hosting a conference this week to discuss the 57-year-old magazine and its legacy.</p>

Officials Disregard His Vatican Diplomatic Passport VATICAN CITY, JAN. 19, 2003 (Zenit.org).- Latin-rite Patriarch Michel Sabbah of Jerusalem was unable to leave Tel Aviv airport because of a security search he was subjected to by Israeli officials. The Vatican's semiofficial newspaper L'Osservatore Romano reported today that the search was a violation of the respect due to a Vatican diplomatic passport, which the patriarch showed at the airport Friday. Consequently, the patriarch was unable to attend the symposium organized on Saturday in Rome by the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. During that event, Archbishop Michael Louis Fitzgerald, council president, publicly noted...

To the Right Honourable, the Lords of Her Majesty's Privy Council: Whereas I have come out of Germany and Bohemia, being sent by my superiors, and adventured myself into this noble realm, my dear country, for the glory of God and benefit of souls, I thought it like enough that, in this busy, watchful, and suspicious world, I should either sooner or later be intercepted and stopped of my course. Wherefore, providing for all events, and uncertain what may become of me, when God shall haply deliver my body into durance, I supposed it needful to put this in writing...

The outgoing chairman of the commission responsible for translating liturgical texts from Latin into English has spoken out “as a duty of conscience” against what he describes as a “pillorying” of the commission’s bishops and staff over many years. Bishop Maurice Taylor of Galloway in Scotland, who has stood down as chairman of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) after five years, together with its American executive secretary, Dr John Page, says the impression given by ICEL’s critics is “mistaken and untrue” and that “ICEL staff do not deserve to be pilloried as they have been”. In...

The martyrs of Compiègne are sixteen Carmelite nuns killed during the French Revolution. Of this revolution today people especially rememeber those three big words on which everyone seems to agree: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It is still in discussion whether the triplet originates from Christianity or freemasonry; anyway it is known that at the beginning, the Revolution preferred to insist more on the doublet Liberty-Equality then on the word Fraternity, considered anyway too sentimental and too "Christian". As a matter of fact, the hardest fight was unleashed in the name of those two first "values", so the opposite manner with which...

Yesterday's thread on the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Summer Plenary Session. turned up a lot of Catholic FReepers suggesting that it's time for the faithful laity to get more visible and active in pressing for a restoration of right order in the Church. To that end, I've decided to develop and maintain a list of Catholic FReepers, sorted by state, as a resource for future activism. Some of us will wish to collaborate on future projects; others may simply find the list handy for purposes of fellowship. If you want to be on this list, please post your...

The US Senate is scheduled to vote on human cloning Tuesday, June 18. IMMEDIATE ACTION IS NEEDED. Americans overwhelmingly oppose human cloning. Yet because all too many Americans feel the cloning issue is too complicated and since they do not have a medical background, they are leaving the decisions up to medical professionals, researchers, and the U.S. Congress. Now is the time for all Americans to engage in this issue. Those that support human cloning are trying to convince the Congress, and even the American public, that there are different types of human cloning based on what the researcher intends...

Supporters of Pope Pius XII took a firm and impressive stand at a major Holocaust Conference, and in so doing, demonstrated that the debate on the wartime pontiff's role during the Holocaust may be shifting in his favor. On April 14-15, Millersville University, in Millersville, Pennsylvania, USA, hosted the Twenty Second Annual Conference on the Holocaust, which was devoted this year to the theme, "Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust." The Conference hosted lectures by a virtual Who's Who of the Popes supporters, detractors and those who fall somewhere in between. Among the presenters at Millersville were authors James Carroll...

The Catholic Church has been the object of much unwanted attention, some of which it has brought upon it-self. Dozens of cases involving clerical "pedophilia" have been tried in the courts, several priests have gone to jail, and various dioceses have had to pay out tens or perhaps even hundreds of millions of dollars (the exact sums are often in sealed settlements) to the victims. There have been some high-profile cases: Bishop Symons of Palm Beach resigned after he admitted his sins with teenage boys. The archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Groer, was forced to resign after several seminarians complained that...

Salus publica suprema lex All ideal forms of government are utopias. A state cannot be constructed on a purely theoretical basis; rather, it must grow and ripen in the way an individual human being matures. But we must not forget that at the starting point of every civilization the state was already there in rudimentary form. The family is as old as man himself, and out of this initial bond man, endowed with reason, created for himself a state founded on justice, whose highest law was the common good. The state should exist as a parallel to the divine...

In 1997 Daniel Goldhagen, a young Harvard academic and son of the German refugee historian Eric Goldhagen, also at Harvard, caused an international sensation with his book Hitler's Willing Executioners. The book attributes the Nazi Holocaust to the 'eliminationist anti-Semitism' that allegedly prevailed among the pre-Hitlerian German people. Germans killed Jews not because some Germans were Nazis, but because there was popular enthusiasm in Germany for killing Jews, which the Nazis parlayed into political success. Although Goldhagen's 'facts' fell prey to the Holocaust scholar Raoul Hilberg and to a book-length refutation by Ruth Bettina Birn and Norman Finkelstein, both of ...

A Sage for the Age Professor Bernard Lewis, the great historian of the Muslim world, talks about bin Laden, the Intifada, and the new threat from Iran. - - - - - - - - - - - - Translated by Jonathan Silverman/Jewsweek.com Jewsweek.com | Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton University, is considered by most of his colleagues as the greatest historian of the Muslim world in our generation. He is Jewish, a native of London, in his 80s. Among his many students are teachers and analysts who work in universities in Israel and the Arab countries. His ...

The UN Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW) has named Dr. Carolyn Hannan, a Swedish "gender mainstreaming" expert, as its new director. Hannan recently completed a stint in the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues at the UN, where she was responsible for implementing gender mainstreaming throughout the UN system. Largely unknown outside UN parlance, gender mainstreaming represents the latest and most sweeping account of radical feminist ideology. Gender mainstreaming is based upon the belief that sex distinctions have been created by male-dominated social hierarchies to perpetuate male power. According to the Office of the Special Adviser ...